Seriously, I have no problem with destruction damage on master from the start. My most recent mage (necrovamp, I'll get to that) is level 60 now and kicking draugr deathlords ass with destro spells.

I do agree destruction isn't a good skill for someone not being a 'pure' dedicated mage, but the other melee combat skills are rather weak without smithing and stamina investment. This isn't about comparison though, I'm just saying how I handle destruction and make it work on master, that ISN'T 100% reduction of cost and constantly staggering the enemy.

I usually use all 6 mage skills as a mage, and from the start you can aim to get the illusion 'aspect of fear' perk which adds 10 damage to all fire spells (flames goes to 18 from 8) and the first fire +damage perk. This gives you a firebolt with around 41-43 damage, which will make you overpowered as hell even on master at the start. You don't need to do this though, I usually just level my skills naturally and still have no problems I can't deal with using tactics etc.

I recommend investing in all the element damage boosting perks (not the additional effects though, like ice paralyse as they are rather useless) as many enemies have weaknesses to specific elements. For example draugr are weak to fire, so against draugr deathlords I use incinerate that does 100 damage per shot, 220 damage dual cast, that number is then increased due to their weakness. So I'm killing these draugr deathlords in 3-4 dual casts or around 4 dual single casts (8 single casts), do consider how fast you can use spells.

The biggest problem is cost, the adept and expert spells cost way to much in my opinion, you have to use gear that reduces the cost, but not to 100% as that takes the fun away IMO, no challenge. I am for around 80-90% reduction and the perk, and I get this from 2 enchant slots and the archmage robes at the moment (necrovamp). Then I can cast a good few spells but not endlessly stagger enemies.

Being a necromage vampire boosts every enchantment you have, and pretty much everything else by x1.25, there is a link in my sig that explains it better. So with 100 enchanting and the right perks (no alchemy, just some store brought potions) I can create good enough gear to reduce all the magicka schools to around 20-40% of the cost, and have a magicka pool of around 500. You can achieve this without being a vamp, but it's easier being a necrovamp as it boosts pretty much everything. Also note that I didn't power level any skills, I started of with crappy found gear, only have stuff this good now I'm level 45-60ish, which took a while.

Knowing enemies weaknesses is a huge help, frost dragons, draugr and most undead are weak to fire, dwemer machines and dremora are weak to shock, fire dragons are weak to ice etc.

If you're obsessed with dealing insane damage, my level 60 mage can conjure a bow and fire a poison, then drink a destruction damage potion and kill an ancient dragon in a few expert level casts, dealing at least 800 damage per dual cast. Destruction is more than viable for use on master at high levels, tired of people saying how useless it is.

That's pretty much it to be honest, if people post their concerns using it I'll try to answer them.

Yes, by all means, lets argue this again.

My stars and gods! Draugr are weak to fire and you can boost fire damage with perks (known for months and listed on the wiki) and you didnt 100% reduce cost, only 90%, and those two numbers are totally different.

Destruction is fixed after all.

in all honesty its because melee (in all forms gain the ability to boost their damage while mage gets squat because a certain type of ppl whined beth into nerfing it.mage has always in almost every single rpg been a glass cannon.In all honest truth if they gave me the option of being powerful i would be fine .I dotn like hitting enemies multiple times just to kill an enemy while a warrior can do it faster and better

Trying to be helpful, but I knew people like you would be like this. I have no problem with destruction on master, so I'm doing something right...

What exactly is your problem with destruction?

Well I shouldn't need to be a vampire to be a mage, but I think most people's problem is how melee damage scales up with skills and perks and enchantments, and magic damage only with perks.

Plus melee seems to level up faster then destruction, or at least thats my perception.

I don't know how powerful you want it to be, saying mages are weak is a bit general and is definitely wrong IMO. Illusion and conjuration are two very strong skills, I can use a mayhem that hits every enemies as it works over the level 50 cap, it even works on dragon preists. Also 2 dremora lords can tear any enemy apart without you doing anything.

I can kill deathlords in 3 dual casted incinerates (fired very fast from a distance), this is without boosting through potions, how strong do you want it to be? Just because you can make 1h weapons that hit for 1000 damage destruction isn't useless.

I find they both level up quite fast, one handed levelling is dependent on the base damage of your weapon. As some people smith up to daedric and get super strong weapons early on, their skill levels quickly due to the high base damage. Once you get the expert level spells destruction levels very fast, 70-100 doesn't take long at all at a natural pace.

Just seems to me that some skills level quicker then others. For example, I had a cloth Alik'r warrior that used the Alteration 'flesh' spells and Alteration seemed to go up VERY fast. One handed also went up pretty quick too, and my smithing was pretty modest.

But destruction and restoration in particular always seem slow to me.

Idk, maybe it's not that strong but considering you can literally stagger an enemy 99.999% of the time...

What happens when you face more then one?

What do you do when you use melee against 3 people?

Destruction is more versatile in those situations (especially on master where 3 people hitting you will often kill you), you can move back firing your spells. I don't stagger every enemy all the time and I get along fine, I would be okay without the impact perk, but it's nice to throw a dual cast in every now and again to keep them of your back.

Generally speaking, I swing my sword. But I ofen have a shield up, and heavy armor on as well.

My point is that impact stagger isn't as epic as he was making it.

Well if you wanted to (and had enough magicka), you could keep staggering 3 enemies at once, the stagger effect is a few seconds.

we should not have to use other schools to make destruction viable, but i would say the exuberant magicka cost for such weak spells ruins destruction (if beth is going to hand make spells instead of giving us the ability to make them they should take out whatever [horrid] mathmatical formula they are using and set the cost by hand)

The counter argument people would make is that you can always enchant four pieces of -25% armor and not pay anything to cast.

I think that is a pretty lame argument though.

Well you don't need other schools, it's nice to have the other schools. I agree with the cost thing, it's to high for adept, expert and master level destruction spells, you have to use fortify destruction gear

But your wrong about the damage, the damage is fine, more than enough for master.

either the damage needs to be uped for the cost of the spells or the cost needs to drop for the damage of the spells, so one of them is wrong (and usually im fine with the damage, its th cost that kills it)

p.s. enchanting is another school, so it is sorta needed to make destruction worth-while


you could also argue that cutting off your leg would help you get over that stubed toe(it would but...would you do it? ). getting rid of the cost (and challange) gets rid of the fun of it

You can get fortify destruction gear without enchanting it, master robes 22%, ring of peerless destruction at 25%, circlet of peerless 25%, I imagine you can get a necklace as well. It's just nice to make your own, so you double enchant.

With vampirism and necromage you only need the archmage robes 18%, peerless circlet 31% and peerless ring at 31% for 80%, master robes instead of archmage for 90% fortify destruction. So you don't need enchanting at all.

but then you have to use restoration to make destruction worth-while, but, the important thing is destruction on its own (no perks form other schools, no enchantments) should be more viable

Just out of curiosity, could we see your build? Perks and attributes are what I'm interested in.

http://skyrimcalculator.com/#103325 - my perks that are relevant, invested in a few other ones like pickpocket for extra carry capacity,

High elf, have ~350 health, 100 stamina and ~650 magicka at level 60. The rest of my attribute points are going into health, I can survive a draugr deathlords ebony bow ebony arrow shot with ebonyflesh up, but not by much. Have 437 armor rating with ebony flesh and the lord stone, +100 with greater ward up.

Roughly my gear (boosted by necromage) and the enchantments:

Archmage robes - 18% fortify all the magic schools, +62 magicka, +125% magicka regen rate
Gloves - +85 magicka, +50 ish carry capacity
Boots - fire resist 50%, stamina regen 40%
Necklace - fortify illusion and conjuration 31%
Ring - fortify conjuration and illusion 31%
Circlet - fortify destruction and alteration 31%
Circlet - fortify destruction and alteration 31%

Can wear two circlets due to the glitch with the thieves guild hood and being a vampire.

a big reason for the criticism of destruction is that when compared to Melee it's inefficient. Sure you can do a large amount of damage with magic, but you can do even more and faster with a melee character.

also, at least back when the arguments still went on, destruction did not scale properly. I do not know if it's fixed now in any of the patches though. As you moved further and further beyond lvl. 50 destruction becomes progressively weaker and weaker, the same is also true for illusion.

Another issue people got really upset about is that it's almost impossible to play a "pure-mage". Where a warrior can utilize a number of versatile skills that all fit within their skill range IE: "Pure-Warrior" and same goes for Rogues. In order for a caster to be truly effective you have to use Poisons/daggers (something akin to rogues) heavy armor (something akin to warriors) heavy enchantments on weapons not normally suited for mages. From a role-playing standpoint it was very dissapointing for me, and others that we had to shirk our original designs (which are fairly common and not at all unorthodox) just to survive at the same rate as the other two main classes.

oh, and another thing that at least made me a little miffed was the absence of what I call "utility Spells". These would be open-lock, water-walking, boyancy, fortify attribute spells, detect life etc. Again, this forces people who'd normally play as pure-mages to have to use skills not designed for a "pure-mage". For instance, a lore-correct wizard would not bother manually picking a lock, with the power of magic he'd just cast a spell that opened the lock for him. It was cool in Oblivion and Morrowind to be able to call upon my magical abilities to achieve effects like that. this also gave the Mage a reputation as a very versatile class. To be honest, I didn't mind the absence of water-walking, but did they have to get rid of open-lock, and detect life? those seem like such obvious skills that wouldn't have messed with the game's graphics like water-walking or levitation would've done.

finally, it's not fun to constantly have to hurl fire-ball after fire-ball at an enemy and feel no accomplishment for it when one sword strike from a powerful blade can kill it immediately.

In conclusion, much of the griping comes from the fact that the "Glass-cannon" design of RPG mages has been severely undermined in Skyrim, or at least back when I played it did. Can someone tell me of any kind of reworking has been done?

I would like to say though, for the sake of being positive, that the spells that are there, and the general sense of power is great. spells in Skyrim have never felt better, I love the sense of power, mystique and vibrancy that Magic gives off. In the next TES, or in DLC, beth, keep doing what you're doing on the presentation department of Magic, because it's awesome, and when the magic system goes into high gear (Which it definitely does, despite my gripes) the magic definitely goes into high gear.

To start, llusion is fine, you can dual cast the novice level spell at level 50 (where enemies stop scaling) and it will still work, mayhem also works with the right perks on every enemy you come across.

My point wasn't that destruction is better than melee, it was that it can be used on master effectively, which I do at the moment. It's not impossible to play a pure mage, I agree it's more difficult as you have to plan a little more, but it's just as viable if you know what you're doing.

Like I've said above, 3-4 dual casted incinerates kill a deathlords on master, that's like 1200 health worth of damage. You would need a 600 damage melee weapon to power attack one hit that enemy, you say the games boring firing spells all the time, imagine how boring it is doing that kind of damage, killing everything in one hit.

I know you can hit huge numbers with melee that you can't with destruction, but that doesn't really bother me, I don't want to do that kind of damage.

fair enough, and I honestly would agree, I don't need to be doing astronomical numbers of damage either. As long as I feel a sense of progressing power I'm fine. Glad to see Illusion's working alright. And you're right, it is still possible to be a pure mage, but it takes a bit more effort than one may expect.

I would like to say for the sake of being positive, that the spells that are there, and the general sense of power is great. spells in Skyrim have never felt better, I love the sense of power, mystique and vibrancy that Magic gives off. In the next TES, or in DLC, beth, keep doing what you're doing on the presentation department of Magic, because it's awesome, and when the magic system goes into high gear (Which it definitely does, despite my gripes) the magic definitely goes into high gear.

I really don't understand this either, My Destruction does fine. I can agree that the Wall Spells and Master spells don't really get anywhere with damage. but Thunderbolt, Incinerate, and Icy Spear all work just fine for high levels.
I mostly play on Expert and I can't kill Ancient Dragons without my Icy Spear, if i get to close with my Two-handed Sword, it ends up eating me o.o